Monday, March 31, 2008

It’s The Fall, Not The Sudden Stop

Dear Children:

Most of you have met military people. They’re just like us with one important difference: they have a heightened sense of existential dismay. They know how random, how fragile, how inane military operations can be. They are asked to do things with purposes larger than their own selves and families and risk their skins for low pay into the bargain.

These facts form the hypothesis of war from ancient times. Soldiers do the prince’s bidding at the prince’s caprice.

No wonder one finds among our military friends a special brand of gallows humor. They speak of life’s slender thread in terms that stress the chances of survival as hit and miss at best.

I overheard a conversation between one clueless civilian and an active duty airborne officer over a question of the mortality of parachutes. The question was, “Say you jump out of an airplane at 20 thousand feet … both the primary and secondary ‘chutes don’t open. How long do you have to live?” The officer impressed me. His riposte: “You have the rest of your life.”

Truth like that does not come in flavors. Life may be a feeble commodity but it is all around us. While death is certain, it can’t contest life in terms of quantity. Compare one moment of death against a multi-googolplex of life moments. If that weren’t enough, each moment of life is pregnant with the next moment of life; something even the confidence of death cannot match.

Each of us has the rest of our lives to live out. We may not know the term of years but we do know that life fills and feeds us, irks and rips at us; life urges and claims us. It’s the best argument I can think of to do life right and well.

It’s also a reason to live healthy and strong.

These thoughts occurred to me on the treadmill Saturday as I was listening to The Blind Boys of Alabama; Higher Ground. It is such a marvelous recording that I didn’t know I was moved until the tears were landing on the belt. You may remember this group as the one that sang the lyrics of Amazing Grace to the tune of House of the Rising Sun. Amazing Grace is so familiar both as a Baptist anthem and as piped for funerals of fallen firefighters. In the Blind Boys reformulation, the lyrics are reborn as the hope John Newton clutched so fervently trying to clear his soul’s stain. He clung to the claim that only Grace could relieve his personal participation in the slave trade. Grace is a life experience.

In the instant album, they do a heart-wrenching call and response version of Precious Lord. This is Thomas A. Dorsey’s struggle late in his life. Dorsey knows it’s late. He asks for a hand to pay out his terminal moments on his feet and alive.

Much Love,

Poppy

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Poppy,

Another inspired post.

Not to quibble, but to inform:

The inspiration for Thomas Dorsey writing "Precious Lord" was the tragic deaths of his wife and infant child in a fire which occurred, I believe, when he was in his 30's, and he lived at least into his 70's.

Yet his exemplary life/death serves your point even more poignantly in a paradoxical way: that tragedy, that inspiration, that song, marked Dorsey's "conversion" from his life with the blues and Ma Rainey to his rebirth as the father of black gospel music.

His "fall" took moments, but in the decades that were the rest of his life he was created anew, enriching our veil of tears.